Cascade is please to announce that we just doubled the size of our secure processing facility in Indianapolis by expanding into a recently vacated adjacent suite. The site is now capable of processing more than 250,000 assets per year for refurbishment and more than 2 million pounds of electronics for recycling.
Indianapolis is the 15th most populous city in the U.S. and is within one day’s drive of half the population in the country. Much of Cascade’s work involves the secure pickup and collection of unwanted IT assets from businesses and institutions, making Indianapolis an ideal location.
“We’ve need to expand because we’ve attracted new clients throughout the region,” said James Ellison, General Manager of Cascade’s Indianapolis facility. “Some of the most respected organizations in Indiana, Kentucky and beyond have trusted Cascade for their ITAD needs. We’ve been pretty quiet about our services in the past, but with our commitment to grow in this community and expand our capacity further, we want to invite more firms to check us out.”
Read more . . .
America Recycles Day - November 15
The current rate of recycling in the United States is now at 34% - good news in that this rate has been increasing, but there is still a long ways to go.
America Recycles Day was started 20 years ago by the organization Keep America Beautiful to educate people about the importance of recycling to our economy and environmental well-being, and help to motivate occasional recyclers to become everyday recyclers.
“America Recycles Day is a call-to-action to motivate individuals to actively pursue a #BeRecycled lifestyle 365 days a year,” said Brenda Pulley, senior vice president, recycling, Keep America Beautiful. “America Recycles Day helps to shine a light on our ongoing efforts to educate and inspire people to reduce, reuse and recycle, and when they buy, to buy products made from sustainable and recycled materials.”
The website
americarecyclesday.org includes information and resources to help your organization and community organize events and actions to promote recycling. Look here for ideas to share.
Annual benchmarking survey seeking input
Over the past several years, Cascade has
surveyed customers to collect information about the current state of their IT Asset Management and Disposition programs. We then aggregate these survey responses and share benchmarking reports to allow organizations to compare their programs with others to help identify opportunities for improvement and best practices. See our website for examples of
past surveys and benchmarking reports.
We are at it again and would greatly appreciate you taking about 15 minutes to complete this year's survey. We will compile the responses and prepare a report for distribution in early 2018.
Just like last year, we are expanding the pool of people invited to participate to all individuals who subscribe to Cascade's newsletter and are some way involved in IT Asset Management or Disposition.
All individual responses will be kept confidential (we will compile all answers). The survey will be open until Friday, December 1st. Please be sure to complete your response by then!
As an additional thanks for completing this survey, we'll enter your name in a drawing for a $250 Voucher to use to purchase any of our quality refurbished products from the Cascade Marketplace (or you can transfer the voucher to someone else in need). See the end of the survey for more information.
We also have some questions about your experience with Cascade and thoughts on new or better services we can introduce. These are optional questions, but we greatly appreciate your input.
China import ban on plastics creates shockwaves
China has recently shut its borders to nearly all recycled plastic and paper/fiber, creating a ripple effect throughout the recycling industry. Both curbside recycling programs that collect cardboard, plastic bottles and bags to electronics recycling programs have been impacted.
It was reported that around
70 percent of the world’s supply of unwanted plastics ended up in China last year, as did two-thirds of wastepaper and over 40 percent of discarded plastics from the United States.
Electronics recyclers, including Cascade, are considering various options for the plastic generated from their demanufacturing and shredding processes. Even the e-Stewards program that certifies processors like Cascade for responsible downstream recycling does not have a sustainable and appropriate answer to this challenge.
In the last 12 months, Cascade generated 143,000 pounds of mixed engineered plastic and 47,000 pounds of acrylic (from LCD screens). While the homogeneous acrylic has more recycling options, the mixed plastic is more problematic. We have approved a domestic waste-to-energy processor to convert the fuel from the plastic into electricity and have invited plastics processors to review our material. Unfortunately, most of the companies specializing in the recovery and manufacture of this plastic left the U.S. for overseas markets, and with low oil prices, it's much cheaper to make products from virgin resins than to recycle used plastics.
Cascade is actively working on long term solutions and will keep you up to date on changes.
